Thursday, 27 March 2008

Wake up and Smell the Coffee @ ToorCon

On April 19th I'm presenting at ToorCon in Seattle. My talk ("Wake up and smell the coffee: design flaws in the Java browser plugin") will be focused on some of the more interesting Java bugs I've found over the last few months, and how these can be exploited cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-architecture (making Java one of the scariest browser plugins there is, in my opinion). I haven't presented at ToorCon before (nor attended one for that matter) so I'm looking forward to it.

Of the talks already scheduled, several have caught my eye, including Richard Johnson's "Fast n Furious Transforms". Fourier Transforms and I were never the best of friends during my undergrad engineering degree but I always have time for cross-discipline approaches in security and Rich has given some great talks in the past (slides for which can be found here) so I will definitely be checking this one out.

I also noted that Adam Shostack is giving a talk entitled "SDL Threat Modeling: Past, Present and Future". Never was a truer word written than in the first line of his abstract: "Everyone thinks threat modeling is great, and then they encounter a formalized threat modeling process." I am looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the evolution of the SDL.

And finally, I'll get to see Nate McFeters discuss "URI Use and Abuse". Protocol handlers have provided a rich seam of vulnerabilities over the last few years and I hear Nate will be showing that things are likely to stay this way for a good while yet.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Nate and Rob Carter presented on 'URI Use & Abuse' last week at Black Hat Europe 2008 in Amsterdam. It was an excellent talk/demonstration and raised lots of interesting questions surrounding the point/usefulness of such functionality together with some of the horrendous holes which seem to exist.